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Study: Parolees less likely to commit new crimes than prisoners who 'max out'

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New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. Parolees in New Jersey are far less likely to commit new crimes and be returned to prison than inmates who serve their full sentences behind bars, a study released Monday found.
(Martin Griff/The Times)

Ex-inmates who were released on parole were 36 percent less likely to commit new crimes than those who served their full sentence behind bars, a study released Monday found.

But there’s a big catch: Many parolees in New Jersey are sent back to prison for violating the conditions of their parole, such as missing appointments with their supervising officer or failing drug tests.

When that’s considered, almost as many parolees are returned to prison as those who served full terms, the study found.

The report’s author, Michael Ostermann, a faculty member at Rutgers University’s School of Criminal Justice, said the results raise new questions about state corrections policies.

"What are we talking about when we are looking at these technical parole violations? Are these serious infractions?" said Ostermann, the director of the Evidence-Based Institute for Justice Policy Research. "Or are we talking about things like missing curfews, changing my address without alerting an officer?"

The study, conducted as part of The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project, noted that returning parolees to prison is expensive, saying "the cost of parole supervision generally is one-tenth that of incarceration." Housing an inmate in a state prison costs about $50,000 a year.

The report focused on New Jersey partly because the state has seen significant declines in its prison population, said Ryan King, the project’s research director. He said the study suggests state policy makers may want to explore new sanctions for parole violators to prevent many from being returned to prison.

"Short jail stays for violations," King gave as an example. "Establishing a system of graduated sanctions and also limiting the amount of time an offender can be returned to prison."

David Thomas, the executive director of the New Jersey Parole Board, declined to discuss the study, which he had been briefed on but had not read. Michael Drewniak, a spokesman for Gov. Chris Christie, said: "We are reviewing the analysis, but broadly speaking it looks very positive in terms of our corrections and parole policies,"

Officials with the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Local 326, which represents about 300 parole officers in New Jersey, said they were not opposed to exploring new ways to deal with minor parole violations but stressed that having more people on parole requires more officers to supervise them. New Jersey currently has about 15,000 parolees, according to the State Parole Board’s website.

"We’re in favor of preventing crime, period," said Karl Waldek, the union’s state delegate. "However it can be done, we’d like to keep that going."

Alex Shalom, the policy council to the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, said the report confirmed what many already know: "That parole continues to work. That max-outs are bad."

"I think we’ve seen in other aspects of the law that more incarceration doesn’t necessarily make us safer," Shalom said, calling for new ways to keep parolees out of prison and an end to New Jersey’s "thirst for maximum sentences."

"We’d see a dramatic reduction in the prison population if we got rid of or at least changed fundamentally the way we deal with technical violations," he said.